So let's go into our next session, and that is with Scott Lawson. Scott is the director of IT Architecture at QAD. Just a little background, QAD actually provides ERP for manufacturing and is a very large technology firm, and has been a Evolve customer for a very long time, and has been very supportive, and has had a lot of input into the solution. So he'll take you through how he's using Evolve and then actually demonstrate their Evolve environment and how they use Evolve today. So Scott, it's all yours.
All right, thank you. And let me know if my voice is OK and if my video is OK. We're going to give it all to you today. And you can see by my template slide or my start slide here, I'm just going to explain about Evolve at QAD, but I'm going to explain a little bit who is QAD and who is on our team, and then I'm going to talk about our purpose for EA, and more importantly the questions of the business.
Because we feel that enterprise architecture, it's got a lot of diagrams, and objects, models, and a bunch of stuff, frameworks and whatever. And many, many people at QAD, and I'm sure outside of QAD, kind of roll their eyes at Enterprise Architecture and don't want to hear anything about it. But what we've tried to do is use Evolve to help people answer questions they have. So it's almost like a Google for the enterprise.
Not big documents, but, hey what is up with the Enterprise? And we do that with collecting information, trying to classify that information, and trying to clarify that information. And I'm going to talk on this theme about collection because we also-- besides Evolve and the main products-- We also own erwin DT, Data Transformation, which we like to call Collector because it used to be called Collector, and it collects information into our repository.
And that's really the only way we can keep up. The demo we just saw is great, I love the web modeler, I'm looking forward to installing it later this month-- or later next month I should say. But it's impossible to draw all the diagrams you need yourself. So we're going to do a demo to show you how to find those answers in Evolve, in our implementation of Evolve, and I'll talk a little bit about our future plans.
So the-- slides are not moving, why is that? There we are. This is a picture of our corporate office in Santa Barbara, California. We are a software company. We make ERP and supply chain software for manufacturers, specifically. Last year we were 40 years old, so we hit the big four oh. And we have a couple of thousand employees, bunch of offices all over the place, lots of confusion, lots of complication, lots of customers, lots of people doing different things.
And we really needed Enterprise Architecture to keep track of all that stuff. Just like Dave was saying, he's a huge company, much bigger than us. And there's stuff all over the place, how do you keep track of it? How do you make sure that you're getting your money out of the things that you buy and that people are communicating together?
And so we've been erwin Evolve users since 2014, which was really pretty much the first version or whatever. On my team-- I have 10 people on my team. Here they are in their Google Meet meeting. We meet video all the time. And you can see their names down here. They each have a specialty, but really we work on the Enterprise Architecture only about 10% of our time, so we really have one person building out Evolve, but it's across all of us.
And maybe it's 15% of the time, or whatever, it varies. They're all highly advanced skilled, not only architects, Enterprise Architects, but also technical architects. And they cover the areas from networking, business, and telecommunications, and so forth and so on. So we're a team of 11 and our purpose in Enterprise Architecture is really to see the big picture. And you need a framework to see that big picture, kind of like this subway map or this transit map that we see here.
But it's also not only to see the big picture but to connect the dots. There's a lot of dots and things in your business that you don't even know about. In fact, IT folks have to have a name for it, which is kind of bad, shadow IT. It's an IT that somebody built, or bought, or did something with that you didn't approve. And we're not trying to get rid of shadow IT, We're trying to bring it out of the shadows.
Because you know what? Oftentimes we find that when somebody brings something into QAD and we know about it, we can connect it to other people who use that tool, and we take a pivot. And we go, you know what? Let's get rid of that old tool and let's use this new tool that these folks looked at. And that leads us to shared decisions, we really want to share the decisions with all of QAD.
So one key principle that we did right away with Evolve, is we open it up to everybody. It's a website, it's just a plain old website. And you can browse through it and look at all of our stuff. And if you have questions, ask us. If you are planning something, let us know. Look into it here, it's a big database of information, not a bunch of diagrams, not a bunch of static things that we put over in some repository that nobody reads. It's Active, as is information for us.
That will help and has helped us elevate IT to a strategic position. We don't want to be the folks in
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